Protect your Privacy with Private Domain Registrations

July 30, 2010

Donncha

Keep your private details secure

One of the requirements of owning a domain is that you must give your contact details when registering that domain.

Internet regulations require that your name, address, email, and phone number be accessible 24/7 to anybody who wants to see them just by looking up your domain. This rule was created to make it easy to contact a domain owner in case of problems, but it has since been exploited by spammers and marketers to bother people. Your personal information is exposed 24 hours a day, everyday, to anyone, anywhere.

Unfortunately since this information is publicly available it may be used by spammers and marketers to send unsolicited messages, or by others who want to harass a domain owner.

You have the power to change this. With a private (“unlisted”) registration through Domains By Proxy (our affiliate company), registering a domain name doesn’t mean sacrificing your privacy. Their name is shown on the registration instead of yours, but you still retain the full benefits of full registration.

Starting today you can add the private registration upgrade when you buy a domain, or if you have an existing domain registered on WordPress.com you can make it private at any time. If your domain expires in less than six months in the current year you’ll get the rest of the year free but you will have to renew the domain and cover the cost of the privacy upgrade for the remainder of the domain’s lifetime.
For example, if it’s July, and your domain expires in two months in September, you can renew the domain today and only be charged for the renewal and private registration upgrade for the coming year starting in September. We’ll give you two free months of private registration upgrade.

The private domain registrations upgrade costs $8 a year and you must purchase the upgrade for the length of time your domain is registered for.

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Private domain registrations are an excellent safety feature, Donncha, and I’m delighted to see WordPress.com offering that option. I have been using that privacy feature on all of my 150 domains registered with Network Solutions.

I’ve seen several people in the forums taken by surprise that this was not already an automatic option! I’ve seen several people in the forums taken by surprise that this not the automatic default. From my experience though, it is not automatic to have your personal information hidden when you host a name you own somewhere.

To be clear, ourselves and domain partners like Godaddy still have to abide by US laws and our terms of service, so if you’re in violation of either of those “private registration” isn’t like the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter, but it is highly effective at keeping your information away from spammers, people who scrape WHOIS, and lookups of your information without a subpoena.

If you want a cheap blog, Google is a great choice. 😉 Upgrades like private registration, custom CSS, VideoPress, et al are how we support things like keeping your blog backed-up hourly, served live out of multiple datacenters, gigabytes of free space, unlimited traffic, unlimited # of blogs, constant improvements and new features, and 24/7 free support.

1&1 provides private registration for free with their domain purchases (which are actually cheaper than GoDaddy’s). Is there some advantage to paying $10.69 to GoDaddy plus $8 to your affiliate, when you can apparently get the exact same benefit from 1&1 for less than half the cost? I have no affiliation to any registrar, but just don’t like to see people get ripped off.

Much needed upgraded for anyone who is using wordpress domain upgrade.

I am still waiting for a day when wordpress provides its own hosting serves with advt, adsense, custom themes, plugins for a nominal fee. So that I don’t need to rely on most of the non-reliable hosting companies.

Interesting concept but it appears like you are exploiting privacy paranoias because I have owned multiple domains for many years and I have never experienced any privacy issues as a result nor in all these years have I heard anyone or any news agency report or complain about this in any shape or form. Seems to me to be another cash grab for something that should be a free option in the first place.

But hey I don’t care one way or another; I am not paranoid. Good luck with the service.

Matt I am well aware of the info out there-I have used TuCows WHOIS services for years to look up register information to find out who owns a domain, when it was created or when it will expire and might become available and like I said- it has never been a problem having my registered info floating around in cyberspace. Further more, there is no such thing as Anonymity in cyberspace, one’s IP fingerprints follows them everywhere they go…

I understand whats siru meant. Matt, we need a wordpress-owned regular hosting company unlike third parties such as dreamhost or godaddy. You can say that I’m waiting for a cheaper and more affordable version of wordpress vip hosting (please put the vip off and think about general people, too). Hoping that you got me.

This is also easy to accomplish from the actual organisations that control the domain. You will need to go to the one that controls domain assigning within your part of the world. Useful info for anyone with a domain already and wants to hide their details.

by law you must show you name.

In your personal info on whois it’ll just show:

Registrant’s address:
The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their
address omitted from the WHOIS service.

Whether or not you use WordPress’ affiliiate to register your domain, private registration may be one of the best things you can do if you want to keep things separate between your real life and your online life. People often use their blogs to post strong opinions, frustrations and more. These posts don’t always look good to a current or potential employer.

I encourage people to grab the opportunity for private registration if and when it is offered. It’s a valuable layer of privacy protection for you.

For those who argue the neccessity of this: If nothing else, it is much like putting your seat belt on while driving. Will it prevent you 100% from getting injured or killed in any and all accident scenarios? No, probably not, but it is one thing you can do to protect yourself. And that is all it is. For a mere $8/yr I would rather do what I can to protect myself than do nothing and wonder later how/why I got hurt:)

This makes things much easier. WordPress was highly recommended by an author who helps other, fledgling freelance writers like me. She also said it is imperative to get a domain name, so people can find you more easily. Now I can do both here!